Reducing noise artifact is a very important factor in the field of video processing. Picture noise is an undesirable visual phenomenon that is caused by the imperfect processes of video capturing, transmission, coding and storage. For instance, on the receiving end of a video application, a noise reduction technique is typically applied as part of post-processing filtering to improve picture quality.
The current generation of media processors reduce noise artifact by using techniques such as motion compensation, motion adaptive, temporal or spatial filters. The motion compensation approach generally achieves the best filtering effect due to the extensive amount of computation and memory spending in the motion search to figure out the best temporal correlation to reduce the noise artifact.
Motion adaptive and temporal approaches do not require the extensive motion search as motion compensation. However, the amount of the computation/memory involved in the temporal processing is not insignificant. The spatial domain approach is the most computationally economical at the cost of picture quality.